


I Did Not See That Coming

by Kira_Dattei



Series: The Old Guard Whumptober 2020 [17]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Immortal Found Family, M/M, No Whump, Post-Canon, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:07:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27595918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kira_Dattei/pseuds/Kira_Dattei
Summary: Nile has to go bail Joe out of jail.Prompt: Wrongfully Accused
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Series: The Old Guard Whumptober 2020 [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1994617
Comments: 4
Kudos: 143





	I Did Not See That Coming

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a whump writer so I can't promise a huge amount of whump in all of these. I just picked the prompt from each day that actually sparked an idea and ran with it.  
> I'm mostly using these as a way to get a feel for the characters and I simply love the relationships given in canon and wanted to explore them.  
> Joe is the lucky whumpee for most of these because I just love him.
> 
> These are all going to be one-shots and they are as connected as you want them to be so you’re good to just read one and not worry about missing anything.
> 
> This is one of the prompts that, despite my best efforts, ended up just being these guys bonding with their new sister. I regret nothing! ^_^

“Hey, Nile, it’s me,” Joe’s voice came through the phone and Nile doublechecked the screen of her phone to confirm that the number she had received the call from wasn’t Joe’s current number. And just by his introduction, she could tell that there was something off.

If she didn’t know how much it took to get this particular emotion from him, she’d think he was embarrassed. He could be getting there though depending on what he was calling her about.

“What’s up?” she asked passively enough and getting a curious look from Andy who was sitting at the table across the room.

“Andy and Nicky aren’t right there, are they?” Joe asked instead and she was getting more curious about what the hell was going on.

“Andy’s here with me and Nicky is doing a perimeter check.”

They were in between missions in the same city, working to take out a pair of groups who’d recently made the jump to human trafficking. They’d finished with one two nights ago and were working on surveilling the other. Joe had just been going to the store to get things he’d need to make dinner and for Nicky to make breakfast in the morning.

“Okay, so definitely don’t tell them yet but I’ve been arrested.”

Nile just barely managed to keep from making some sort of exclamation in response.

“And why not?” she instead asked, trying to keep her voice casual without being too obvious. She assumed Andy would still figure her out because it was Andy.

“Because I don’t want them to overreact. They will rush to get me out when it can only be a case of mistaken identity. Once they realize I’m not who they’re looking for, I’ll be released.”

Their fake identities were solid, Nile knew. These people had gotten good over the years at faking documentation and Copley had just made it all easier. Joe was likely correct that this would just be a matter of waiting it out. The difficulty would be that it could take long enough that Nicky and Andy would start wondering where Joe was. They all kept close tabs on when someone who went out was supposed to be back. They weren’t as picky about knowing exactly where they were but the when of their return was always communicated.

How could Nile word anything she wanted to ask Joe without giving him away? Because if Joe said Andy and Nicky would overreact to this, he was probably right. He knew them better than Nile did.

“Has this happened before?” she settled on asking.

“Not for a while. And there have been times it wasn’t wrongful imprisonment considering some of the places we’ve been arrested.”

That wasn’t surprising, Nile realized after she noticed she didn’t have to fight a reaction. Some things about these people’s experiences just made sense and of course they had done things that actually got them arrested.

“Alright, fine. I’ll head your way. Next time just ask before you leave,” she said, knowing that she really couldn’t say anything without giving Joe away. She’d probably already gotten Andy suspicious enough.

“Grab my Adams passport. It might speed things up to have a second form of ID and you there to be an alibi for the night before last.”

Shit, that was the night they’d run the attack on the traffickers. Now she had to come up with an alibi to sell to the cops. And it was supposed to match the story he told how?

“You owe me big time,” she practically growled out.

“Of course, _habibti_. I just couldn’t ask the others as they weren’t with us that night. I’ll see you soon.” Joe hung up and Nile let out a sigh as she slid her phone into her pocket.

“What’s that all about?” Andy asked.

“Need to meet up with Joe. He didn’t check his wallet before leaving to get everything and he didn’t want to take more time to come back and go back, figured it would be faster if I just met him there.”

“And he called you because?” It was obvious Andy didn’t really buy it but she was indulging them.

“I don’t know. Didn’t ask.” She stood and headed for Joe’s backpack where he kept his extra cash and documentation. She looked through four other passports before she found the one he’d specified and pocketed that and some money just in case.

She headed for the door and was sliding her shoes on when Andy called out to her again. “I only care if either of you come back bloody. Otherwise, I don’t want to know.”

Nile turned back toward Andy and gave her a grin as she opened the door with a flourish and replied, “You are wise beyond your years!”

Andy scoffed. “And you need to spend less time with Joe. One of him is enough. Oh, and I will also care if this means we don’t eat until midnight.”

Nile gave a short wave as she closed the door behind her and headed for their second car, figuring out where the police station was and heading that way, driving with practically neurotic care. It took about half an hour with traffic filling up and Nile spent it trying to work out what to tell the cops for an alibi because they would have definitely talked to Joe and asked him about the night in question. She was almost there when the last thing Joe had said to her clicked as to what he was meaning with it, maybe someone had come around and he’d needed to be careful about how he worded things himself.

She couldn’t wait to have been with them long enough that she could figure shit like this out a lot quicker. She was looking forward to two words being all she needed to know what one of them had in mind like all the others had. Or even not needing to say anything at all like Nicky and Joe could. She knew it couldn’t just be because they were a couple that they could do that and it was always really cool when she saw it.

But Andy and Nicky had been out on surveillance three nights ago, Joe and Nile staying behind in the safe house and Joe had been teaching her how to make one of Andy’s favorite dishes just because he wanted to do something nice for her and Nile had wanted to learn.

And it had become one of her favorite pastimes, watching Nicky and Joe cook. It was an art form they shared as opposed to the ones that were unique to each man. And it was mesmerizing to watch them move with as much confidence there as they did in combat. Nile figured she would eventually ask how long it took for them to learn that this was something they were both good at, especially when Andy was older than them by a long shot and she only had a handful of things she was good at cooking.

Though Andy had told her once just randomly that she didn’t care enough to learn when she’d been lucky to end up with family that could do it better than she ever could.

“I’m good at plenty. And you don’t need to be a good cook to get food in your belly.”

Joe had passed behind Nile’s chair then and leaned down to whisper, “She will be the first to complain if we have to go a long time without Nicky’s or my cooking.”

Nile pulled up to the police station, parking in a spot for visitors as she let out a deep sigh and reminded herself that the two of them had been at their rental cooking dinner for another friend that was travelling with them most of the late afternoon and into the evening. And then they’d stayed in for the rest of the night, eating and hanging out. He was Joey Adams and she was Nile Fredricks.

She was good to go.

About an hour later, Joe was released and he went right to Nile and wrapped her in a tight hug, saying something in Arabic and she rolled her eyes at him.

“You really need to start remembering the languages I don’t speak,” Nile chastised as he let her go, giving her temple a brief kiss.

He really was just a sweet man, Nile acknowledged.

“Or you could start learning and follow along,” he shot back with one of his usual smiles.

“I’ll get there.” They climbed into the car and Nile looked over at him for a minute. “Where are we going?” she asked when he didn’t catch on to what she was waiting on.

“Oh, the car is still at the store. They came up on me after I finished up and was loading everything into the car. Not that it matters for some of it because it’s been in there for hours now. I’ll have to go buy it again.”

Nile grinned at how put out Joe looked at that. He got so picky about food. Which was really ironic because he was also the one most likely to just eat junk food besides her. And even she sort of didn’t count since it was something from her generation.

She started the car and pulled out, getting a general direction from Joe since she hadn’t been to the store so didn’t know exactly where it was. And Joe was scary good at remembering directions.

Once they were on the road, she couldn’t keep from asking, “So, you’ve been arrested before?”

Joe gave her an amused grin and she wondered how much she could believe anything that followed. He was obviously in a good mood, maybe because it had been so easy to get out of it this time around. “Oh, plenty of times, though we started caring about avoiding it just a bit more once things got more technologically advanced. It was so much easier to have whoever wasn’t imprisoned break us out when all they had was some rough sketch of us.”

“You sound way too proud of that.”

Joe shrugged. “When you’ve broken out of pretty much anything you can be held in, your opinion shifts on the matter and it’s just easier to be amused.”

“What else have you broken out of? You specifically so you can’t take credit for any of the others.”

“I would never! We’ve worked too hard to maintain our own tallies.”

“So jails are a given. How about the morgue?”

Joe scoffed. “We’ve had to find our ways out of more morgues than jails. And, actually, if we end up needing help getting out of a morgue, we owe everyone who helps a favor, anything they ask.”

“An ambulance or the back of a cop car?”

“An ambulance, yes. But Booker is the only one we had to help out of the police car. He’d started a fight in a bar and got arrested before we could get him out. We almost left him to get out on his own but someone had given his description from a mission we’d done about a decade earlier. It was too close and Andy was worried they’d link him to what we’d done and that would get complicated.”

“Doesn’t it always with you guys? How about a grave?”

Joe gave a whole-body shudder. “Can you imagine how difficult it is to break out of a box and then dig your way out while trying to not do it when anyone else was around? We try to cover it back up, fix the dirt so it doesn’t look like someone crawled out of their grave. People get extremely suspicious and creeped out about that sort of thing.”

“How many empty John and Jane Doe graves have you guys been responsible for?”

Joe thought it over for a few seconds, obviously counting it out. “If I’m remembering correctly, we’re at eighty-three collectively. Those deaths that take some time to come back from can be extremely inconvenient when people are ready to bury a bunch of people. I had to stay in a mass grave for almost a whole day because I couldn’t leave until there was no one around. I swear I smelled for weeks afterward.” He shuddered and she didn’t blame him.

“Any crazy stalker sex dungeons?” Nile asked, barely managing to keep the smile off her face.

She was so pleased that she’d looked over to him to have caught the uncomfortable look on Joe’s face. So little made Joe uncomfortable, as could be said for all of them though Joe’s more outgoing and joking nature with everyone made it seem like much more of an accomplishment whenever she got that reaction.

“Just please don’t ask Andy or Nicky about that. They’ll spend months teasing me about it. It was a target and I made somewhat of a mistake in my impressions of the man. We weren’t certain who he would go for and so both Andy and I were striking up conversation with him. He’d seemed to go for Andy and I was searching his home but the asshole had one of his lackeys follow and gas me. But he didn’t bother to actually take me too far away and Andy and Nicky found him before he got too far with anything. Turn left up here.”

Nile made the turn before giving him a surprised look. He still mostly just looked uncomfortable. “How long ago was this?”

Again Joe seemed to be thinking it over. “August, 2004. Munich. I’ve only been back there once as when we went there, the teasing was beyond all expectation.”

“Why tease you about that?” Seriously, Nile really didn’t think that was funny at all.

Joe picked up on her tone and reached over to hold her hand over the wheel briefly. “As I said, he didn’t get very far in anything and I knew the others were near. They tease me because they know it was something they could.” He let out a frustrated groan as he crossed his arms and slouched down into the seat. “It had been a very long time since I had misread someone’s interest in me so entirely. Andy teases me because she figured out immediately that he held no interest in her. Nicky teases me by telling me of sexual toys and contraptions they’d found in the house and he knows I have no interest in that sort of thing.”

“I’d say that’s ‘too much information’ but I can’t actually decide if it really is or if it’s sort of sweet.”

Joe laughed, his normal composure seeming to recover. “I believe too much information would be detailing the things we’ve tried out simply to say we have.”

“Nope! You’re not doing that! I know the day is coming that I walk in on you guys and that’ll be enough for me, thanks.”

He laughed again and gave her the last few directions to the store, Nile spotting the car he’d driven in the parking lot and she parked next to it. Joe had unbuckled his seatbelt and was moving to get out when Nile asked one more question. “What’s your favorite escape? And if you say it was the creepy stalker sex dungeon, I will punch you until you either forget why or stop healing from it.”

Joe gave her a grin that told her he probably would have done exactly that. “You are learning,” he confirmed before looking thoughtful. “It’s so hard to choose. There have been so many and we’ve gotten out of things in pretty fantastic ways.” His expression became soft in a way that always made Nicky freeze in whatever he was doing and stare. “The first time we met Andy and Quynh, when they finally tracked us down because they were the ones who knew what the dreams meant, they saved us. I met my family that day. Nothing compares.”

Nile acknowledged that it was a great sentiment and exactly what she’d expect from Joe but then she recalled her own first encounter with “Andromache of Scythia but you can call me Andy” which Andy had told her about what she’d said after Nile was unconscious later.

“She helps you guys out for an introduction but I get kidnapped and shot? How is that fair?”

“Officially she kidnapped Booker, too. Tied him to a chair and everything.” Nile rolled her eyes at how Andy handled some things. “Though you must understand how things were different in finding you. When Booker died and we started dreaming of him, travel was faster and places were more identifiable. It would have taken us a shorter time but the three of us had been working separately at the time and had to reconvene first. And much about your death was very identifiable, easy to figure out. Your uniform, the weapon used to kill you, the clothes of the women around you, part of your name. Add that to what we know are active war zones right now and extremely better technology and you were easy to track. Nicky and I died over a century before we met the women in our dreams. By then, we’d learned much about them. We wouldn’t have needed them saving us to know they were worthy of our trust.”

Nile gave a short nod, seeing where he was coming from on that. While they had told her of how long it used to take for them to find each other before, she admitted that she had vastly underestimated what she’d thought they’d meant. Then again, she still thought a year was a pretty long time. She didn’t think of time the way they did yet. Hell, the guys didn’t even think of time the same when they’d stopped being affected by it. It was a much less concrete thing than how she’d been raised and she wondered if that made so much difference in how they accepted things.

Joe leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to her cheek before he opened the door, looking over his shoulder as he said, “Thank you for ensuring I got released in a timely manner. You are kind beyond measure, Nile.”

Nile rolled her eyes as his voice shifted at the end as he added a teasing tone even as she knew he was still genuinely thanking her. Because that’s just how Joe was.

“Like I said: you owe me.”

“Yes, I do. I’ll see you back at the house soon. I need to figure out what is salvageable after being stuck in the trunk for the past few hours.”

Nile ended up waiting for Joe to finish up and then followed his car back to the safe house, Joe giving her an understanding smile and not questioning her or saying anything that made her feel bad about wanting to make sure he got home alright this time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading and hope you enjoyed. Feel free to drop a kudo and/or comment if you feel so inclined and I'll see you next time.


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